Social Man: Palestinian Capitalists and British Colonial Rule

A lecture by Sherene Seikaly, Director of The Middle East Studies Center and Assistant Professor of History, American University in Cairo

Seikaly will explore how Palestinian capitalists and thinkers formed ideas of welfare, standard of living, and economic development in the 1930s and 1940s. Such efforts were intimately linked to the growing pervasiveness of the discipline of economics, which colonial officials used during the Mandate years to manage and conceptualize colonies and people. They were also a strategic response to settler-colonialism; faced with relentless political exclusion, capitalists and reformers found refuge in the economic as a discrete realm. By looking at the 1930s and 1940s Seikaly will explore the temporal boundaries of the liberal. More importantly, she will engage the importance of economic notions of a collective as constituting, alongside the much more studied centrality of nationalism, Arab liberal thought.

Sherene Seikalyis Assistant Professor of history and Director of the Middle East Studies Center at the American University in Cairo. She is the co-editor of theArab Studies Journal, and co-founder and editor ofJadaliyyae-zine. She holds a doctorate in history and Middle Eastern and Islamic studies from New York University. Situated at the intersections of studies on consumption, political economy, and colonialism, Seikaly's forthcoming manuscript,Bare Needs: Palestinian Capitalists and British Colonial Ruleexplores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape notions and experiences of territory, nationalism, the home, and the body.

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